because, as
with the railway employees, the Serbs were short of people for those
posts, since they had barristers well qualified to be employed, as they
were, for example, at Sombor, in the position of temporary judges. Even
the town advocate was not dismissed, although this healthy gentleman had
superseded a Serb forty-two years of age, considerably older than
himself, who had been compelled to join the army. Not alone were all
these functionaries left in office, but the papers sent to them were in
their own language, Magyar or German. And in return they generally were
loyal to the Yugoslavs.

TEME[vS]VAR IN TRANSITION

An extraordinary state of things was to be seen at Teme[vs]var, where
the Magyar mayor was one of the most worried men in Europe. Until
February 1919 he was being asked to serve not two but several masters.
Some uncertainty existed as to whether the town was under French or
Serbian military command, but that was not a very serious question.
There was at Novi Sad a temporary Government for all the Voivodina, this
was the "Narodna Uprava" (National Government), consisting of eleven
commissaries, each over a department, who had been appointed by the
Voivodina Assembly of 690 Serbs, 12 Slovaks, 2 Magyars and 6
Germans--one deputy for every thousand of the population. The mayor of
Teme[vs]var could have reconciled the wishes of the Narodna Uprava and
the military authorities, but there was a Magyar Jewish Socialist, a
certain Dr. Roth, who had elected himself to be head of the "People's
Government," and was subsequently appointed by telephone from Buda-Pest
the representative of the Hungarian Government. Roth organized a civil
guard, mostly of former Hungarian soldiers, who--although he paid them
well (since Buda-Pest had given him 12 million crowns for propaganda
purposes), yet had a way of borrowing a coat or cap from Serbian
soldiers and, arrayed in these, holding up pedestrians after nightfall.
Roth had therefore been granted the right to rule, but--save for the
dubious guard--his power was only that which the Serbian or French
authorities would give him. He issued many orders to the mayor, some of
which were very questionable, as for instance when he sent provisions
out of the Banat to Hungary. This produced so great a scarcity that the
flour-mill employees thought it was the time to go on strike; they
demanded 80 per cent. increase in wages, without undertaking to go back
to work if they received i